Prizewinning science journalist Sonia Shah presents a startling examination of the pandemics that have ravaged humanity-and shows us how history can prepare us to confront the most serious acute global health emergency of our time. “ grounded, bracingly intelligent study” - Nature It’s this kind of repeated, intimate contact that allows the microbes that live in their bodies to cross over into ours, transforming benign animal microbes (.Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | A New York Times Editor's Choice It also forces wild species that hang on to cram into smaller fragments of remaining habitat, increasing the likelihood that they’ll come into repeated, intimate contact with the human settlements expanding into their habitat. including the medicinal plants and animals we’ve historically depended upon for our pharmacopeia. Habitat destruction threatens vast numbers of wild species with extinction.
The problem is that cutting down forests and expanding towns, cities and industrial activities creates pathways for animal microbes to adapt to the human body. In fact, most of these microbes live harmlessly in animals’ bodies. wild animals are not especially infested with deadly pathogens poised to infect us. Although stories illustrated with pictures of wild animals as ‘the source’ of deadly outbreaks might suggest otherwise. Most, more than two thirds, originate in wildlife. The majority, 60%, originate in the bodies of animals. They include HIV, Ebola in West Africa, Zika in the Americas, and many novel coronaviruses. Since 1940, hundreds of microbial pathogens have emerged or re-emerged into territory where they’ve never been seen before.
But speculation about which wild creature originally harboured the virus obscures a more fundamental source of our growing vulnerability to pandemics: the accelerating pace of habitat loss.
The animal origin of the disease is a critical mystery to solve. Or, as one later-debunked theory suggested, a snake. The race is on to identify the animal source of Covid-19, the coronavirus that now holds several hundred million people in quarantines and cordons sanitaires in China and elsewhere.
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